The present invention is an architecture for servers implementing a system providing access over a network to pay-per-view information. More particularly, the present invention is a highly distributed architecture allowing refundable purchases of access to pay-per-view information over a network.
Co-owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,930,777, entitled xe2x80x9cMethod of Charging for Pay-Per-Access Information Over a Network,xe2x80x9d issued Jul. 7, 1999; and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/893,503, entitled xe2x80x9cBandwidth-Preserving Method of Charging for Pay-Per-Access Information on a Network,xe2x80x9d filed Jul. 11, 1997, disclose different protocols for providing access over a network to pay-per-view information. These applications do not provide an architecture for a system implementing access, nor do these applications disclose or suggest a means of providing for a refund of a purchase of access when a consumer is dissatisfied. In addition, neither of these applications specifically addresses how to keep a consumer who has purchased information from providing the address of that information to others. The present invention provides an architecture for a system implementing purchases and refunds of access over a network, such as the Internet, of pay-per-view information, and does so in a way that allows for scaling, i.e. natural growth in the system in response to growth and demand.
To describe the present invention in the context of the Internet, this specification uses some standard Internet terminology associated with Web documents and transport protocols. Hypertext markup language (html) is a format used by most documents on the World Wide Web (W3). A uniform resource locator (URL) is a Web address, which uniquely identifies the location of a particular document (information-bearing page) on the network. A hypertext transfer protocol (http) is the standard protocol used to retrieve and view Web documents. A common gateway interface (cgi) is a Web object that when referenced executes a program at a destination address, and returns some data or a program-generated html document. An extended URL (also called a cgi-extended URL) is a Web address that is said to be extended because of having data used as input by a cgi program at a destination address. An example of an extended URL is
http://www.site.com?data=3991772391.
The present invention is a highly-distributed architecture of servers on a network for implementing a system of pay-per-view access over the network. These servers operate independently but cooperate to provide for both the payment for access to pay-per-view information as well as a refund when a customer is dissatisfied. The architecture is said to be distributed because different tasks performed by the system, such as collecting payment or offering a refund, reside on different servers, acting as independent agents.
The architecture includes four kinds of servers, each having a different role. All of the servers can be owned by a single entity, called here a broker. As will be explained below, a consumer interested in purchasing access to information provided by a vendor is directed to a price tag server, which further describes the information to the consumer and enables the consumer to purchase the information or decline the offer for sale. If the consumer decides to purchase the information, the consumer is directed to a receipt server which provides the consumer with the receipt for the purchase in a way that allows a refund. The receipt server then directs the consumer to the actual location of the pay-for-view information. After viewing the information, if the consumer wants a refund, the consumer uses the receipt to link to a refund serve, which has the consumer provide a reason for granting the refund. Then the refund server conveys this explanation to the information vendor, who, by communication through the refund server, grants or denies the refund.
The architecture of the present invention also provides for a prelude to the above scenario. In the prelude, a consumer observes an advertisement for an information vendor""s pay-per-view information posted on the network by an advertiser different from the information vendor. The referral server redirects the consumer from the advertiser to the information vendor, providing this redirection in a way that allows the other elements of the architecture both to compensate the advertiser for the referral and to reclaim the compensation from the advertiser if the consumer is granted a refund.
In the case of an implementation on the Internet, the independent automated transaction processing elements of the distributed architecture can be generic http servers with cgi capability.